The Unforking of KDE's KHTML and Webkit Begins

Jiilik Oiolosse writes to tell us Ars Technica is reporting that after years of existing seperately, KHTML and Webkit are finally coming back together. "In open source terms, this may be as big of a deal as the gcc and egcs merger of yonder days. KHTML and Webkit are definitely coming of age. The KDE developers, responsible for the original creation of KHTML, are dedicated to seeing this unforking happen and are taking a leading role in that effort."

Re:How is it?

[ZachPruckowski]

Well, it's a famous forking/unforking story regarding GCC, and today we've had a GCC forking story, and a forking->unforking story. Since stories about successful unforks and stories about GCC aren't all that common on Slashdot, it makes sense you haven't seen it here before.

Fortunately, in this case the reference is actually relevant to the process and the discussion. In the GCC story, it was completely unrelated to a license-based fork of GCC.

Four standard browsers.

[LWATCDR]

So we have the Webkit family.
The Gekko family.
Opera.
and the IE family of browsers.
All this would be great if they would all follow the standards!
Okay it would be great if IE followed the standards instead of making them up as they go. IE7 is better but far from perfect.
I wounder if there is any chance that Firefox will move to Webkit in the future? I know it is unlikely but one does wonder.

As big as GCC?

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

As big as GCC? I'll need Wikipedia's help just to know what Webkit is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webkit [wikipedia.org]

Re:Four standard browsers.

[omfgnosis]

Personally, I think a new open source project to bring a Webkit-based browser to Windows that attempts to actually fit into Windows could easily kill Firefox. No bloat, superior standards support, what isn't there to love?

There used to be such an effort, called Swift. When Safari for Windows was announced, the Swift developer(s?) announced that they'd continue development, switch to win32 WebKit builds and provide a native Windows user experience with a WebKit renderer. Now swift.ws is gone. I seem to recall it'd disappeared before, so I don't know if the dev(s?) changed their plans or just have shitty hosting.

Re:Webkit wins

[IceFox]

For example check out some neat stuff that Zack has been doing in his spare time with webkit in Qt. http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2007/07/web-on-canvas-a nd-dashboard-widgets.html [blogspot.com]

Re:Webkit wins

[shutdown -p now]

I wonder if this actually means that WebKit will become a standard Qt (and not just KDE) component. Qt has its own HTML rendering engine currently, but it's rather simplistic. I wonder if Trolltech has decided it's time for something more powerful...

Re:Can you get Windows Binaries?

[Phil Urich]

The Safari 3 beta for Windows is faster than Firefox. See http://www.apple.com/safari/ [apple.com]

I had my doubts, but now that I've looked at Apple's entirely unbiased official site I'm convinced! :P

Seriously, do your research first. Safari kindof cheats (and by kindof, I mean majorly) with onload, see this article for example [howtocreate.co.uk]. Quote, "Well, its results are almost certainly wrong, and it will appear a lot faster than it really is, if JavaScript is used to time it. The results are completely unreliable." The author suspects it wasn't intentional cheating, though. Regardless it's not as straightforward of an issue as Apple's PR department would like you to think.

(by the way, Konqueror launches far faster than Safari 3 claims to on that publicity site; is that Konqueror being quick, Windows being slow, 64-bit computing actually being an improvement, or the fact that they tested that on an iMac? I bet they used XP SP2 Home :P )